Activist makes property available near Bush ranch

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, August 10, 2006

Anti-war activists Cindy Sheehan and Jeff Paterson at the Veterans for Peace convention at the University of Washington.

Anti-war activists Cindy Sheehan and Jeff Paterson at the Veterans for Peace convention at the University of Washington.

Photo: Gilbert W. Arias/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Army veteran Steve Mortillo searches for fallen friends among grave markers on display outside of the HUB at the University of Washington on Thursday. Mortillo, of New Jersey, served in Iraq in 2004-05. He is now a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and was participating in a Veterans for Peace convention. Mortillo said the names of 12 of his friends who were killed in Iraq were on the markers. less

Army veteran Steve Mortillo searches for fallen friends among grave markers on display outside of the HUB at the University of Washington on Thursday. Mortillo, of New Jersey, served in Iraq in 2004-05. He is ... more

Photo: Gilbert W. Arias/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Sheehan offers refuge to war deserters

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(Editor's Note: This story has been altered. U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, a psychiatrist, served in the Navy in California during the Vietnam War. The original version of this story misstated where he served.)

It was at the Veterans for Peace national convention in Dallas last year that Cindy Sheehan says she was galvanized to seek a meeting with President Bush at his Crawford, Texas, ranch.

The result was a 26-day sit-down protest near Bush's ranch that attracted common folk and luminaries from across the nation, rejuvenating the anti-war movement.

On Thursday, Sheehan, who became a peace activist after her soldier son, Casey, was killed in Iraq in 2004, was at the Veterans for Peace national convention at the University of Washington.

Now almost 40 days into her fast supporting war resisters and their families, Sheehan, though weak, announced that she is offering land she bought in Crawford near Bush's ranch as a refuge for U.S. troops who desert to resist the war in Iraq.

"What is the noble cause that my son died for in Iraq?" Sheehan asked, echoing her remarks from last year as she spoke Thursday on the steps of the HUB on the UW campus.

Joined by conscientious objectors from the Vietnam War, the 1991 Persian Gulf War and Iraq, Sheehan said she decided to offer her land because 12,000 more U.S. troops are being deployed to Iraq, calling the war "this nightmare, and it's breaking my heart."

Sheehan is among what Veterans for Peace leaders bill as an "all-star cast of war resisters" in Seattle this week. At least 425 of its 5,000 membership signed up for the convention, which opened Thursday with calls for disengagement by the United States in Iraq and Israel in Lebanon.

Gray-haired veterans from the Vietnam War joined fresh-faced veterans from the current war. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Seattle, a Navy psychiatrist who served in the Navy in California during the Vietnam War and an early opponent of the war in Iraq, is slated to speak to the group today.

Among a contingent of younger Iraq Veterans Against the War were several current service members.

One not wearing a name badge declined to reveal his identity. He said, with confirmation from his peers, that he was from the Seattle area, in his 20s, and had been "away-without-leave from a combat unit now in Iraq" for an undisclosed period of time.

The AWOL soldier said he decided to flee the Army after the invasion of Iraq because he believes the war illegal. He said he joined the military before 9/11 "because I had been to five different high schools and went through family problems. The military was a way to get friends and family structure." He said he first began considering risking prosecution for desertion after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Being AWOL, however, has been "hell," he said, not only because of rifts in his family, but also because of "the uncertainty of not knowing if I will be caught as a deserter or if I should go public and turn myself in. I am constantly back and forth; it's always on my mind."

He will have more to think about at 9 a.m. today, when a fellow soldier he knows who also is AWOL -- Ricky Clousing, a 24-year-old Army sergeant and interrogator from Seattle who served in combat in Iraq -- appears outside the HUB with lawyers, relatives and supporters to announce he is turning himself in to authorities. He left Fort Bragg in 2005 after returning from Iraq with the 82nd Airborne Division.

Several members of the military supporting efforts against the war said they were careful to attend the convention on military leaves.

Christina Taber, 26, of Madison, Wis., is an Army reservist activated for 18 months who works in behavioral health at Camp Atterbury, Ind., where she hears stories from soldiers returning from war.

"I think hearing their powerful war stories motivated me to get involved" in the veterans efforts to end the war, Taber said.

Taber said she became a veteran for peace after a fellow soldier died in April 2003 before deployment to Iraq. The death was linked to the mandatory anthrax inoculation she received.

Damon Murphy, 26, of Minneapolis, meanwhile, a U.S. Navy submariner based in San Diego, said he joined the anti-war movement seven months ago. Murphy, who has 10 weeks to go on his enlistment, said he has no orders for Iraq but acknowledged that if he did, "I'd be in jail" refusing to go.